Like a Thief in the Night

by Bettie Sharpe

  He kept on her as her body shook, pushing her harder until her pleasure broke like a wave from a stormy sea. She trembled and shuddered as his ragged breath raged in and out of him. She still heard the shower above the noise of her pounding heart. And that keening moan, like a teakettle coming to a boil, was that her voice?

  He lifted his mouth from her, covered her body with his. She felt his hands on her pussy, guiding the wide head of his cock into the still-quivering heart of her. He was hard again, and merciless in his conquest, piercing her deepest places, pushing her body to a relentless crescendo.

  Desperate to regain control of her body, she caught her breath and held it until blue-white lights burst to life behind her eyelids—a galaxy of stars, the very color of his eyes. She lost hold of an instant—or was it an hour? Her body took the breath she had denied it and exploded into another orgasm as if to spite her.

  Dizzy and confused, she opened her eyes. He was still moving above her, inside her. She watched the scar over his heart move up and down as he pushed himself to climax. She raised her eyes to his face.

  He was watching her. He had been watching her the whole time, waiting for her to look at him, waiting for this connection. His gaze was steady as a madman’s, she couldn’t look away.

  She wanted to look away. His eyes were too intimate, like he thought fucking meant something beyond mutual satisfaction. Like he thought taking her meant owning her. She was half afraid it did.

  Looking into his eyes, Arden imagined she saw something of herself in them—steady madness, amoral obsession, and unquenchable desire. An indelible synchronicity their opposing loyalties could not erase.

  She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. She feared he saw too much.

  His body shuddered with release, but he still watched her. She closed her eyes to shut him out. When she let sleep take her, she saw his face in her dreams.

  Chapter Four

  Arden awoke to her third day of captivity with an atypical languor. Instead of jumping out of bed, she savored the feel of the silk sheets against her naked skin. She stretched, arching her back and enjoying the delicious soreness of her muscles.

  She didn’t know how many times Aniketos had taken her, or how long she had slept. She only knew that every time she woke, he had been there, watching her, ready with his hands and his tongue and his never-failing cock to fuck her until she forgot how to speak.

  And when her body was wrung of pleasure, he’d used his big, clever hands to massage her muscles. He had searched out every sensitive part of her, exploring her reactions, imprinting his touch on every centimeter of her skin. He had kneaded this deep languor into her body, used his hands to press this strange new sense of physical contentment right into her pores.

  He had made her crave him. What a devious man.

  Her stomach growled hard and twisted with hunger. Without Aniketos to distract her, she recalled that she had eaten only bread and fruit the previous day. She slid out of bed and washed quickly in the shower before going in search of food.

  She thought about pulling some of Aniketos’ clothes from the closet, but they smelled of sandalwood and smoke—the same subtle scent she remembered from his skin. She wrapped herself in the length of red silk she had found the previous day—a more difficult task than she had anticipated. She ended up wrapping the thing around her body several times and tucking the loose end into the top, above her breasts.

  The wide table of blue-green glass was empty when she arrived in the dining room. She continued on to the kitchen. Aniketos was there, his back to the door, cooking on an antique stainless steel gas stove.

  He was dressed much as he had been the previous morning—black pants and a loose-fitting gray button-front shirt. A smile tugged at her lips. She squelched the expression immediately. In only a few short hours, he had conditioned her body to react to his presence with pleasure, but Arden was not fool enough to mistake her sensations for feelings.

  Darkriver had taught her to suppress her emotions, and like all her other lessons, she had taken it to heart. She had been trained to experience reactions instead of emotions. Where other people claimed to feel things in their heart or soul, Arden reacted with her body and mind. She felt pleasure instead of joy, rage in place of sorrow, and lust instead of love.

  So he gave you a good time, Arden told herself, that won’t stop you from killing him…as soon as you can figure out how to kill him.

  At the stove, Aniketos divided the contents of the frying pan onto two plates and turned to bring them to the dining room. He stopped when he saw her.

  She clutched the silk more tightly around her, but she didn’t look away from him. Despite the many different times and ways they had come together over the previous eighteen hours, the intensity of his pale gaze was unabated. He set the plates down on the counter and closed the distance between them.

  She watched him—her heart pounding—waiting for the instant he would touch her. His hands closed around her bare shoulders as he bent his head toward hers. Her stomach clenched with hunger, but she craved his touch more than she craved food.

  She opened her mouth and pressed her tongue against his. He tasted faintly of smoke again and of some salty food. His hands tugged the edge of the silk she had wrapped around herself and sent it sliding to her feet. She was naked again, pressed against him, her hands working furiously to part the buttons on his shirt so she could rub her aching nipples against his chest, so she could feel his heartbeat beneath her cheek.

  If he had made her crave him, then she had done the same to him. His clever hands were clumsy in their urgency, fumbling with the buttons on his shirt.

  Her stomach growled, reminding her that she had far more immediate needs. She braced her hands on his chest and pushed him away.

  “God and the Devil, what have you done to me?”

  His breathing was harsh, but he answered with a wry smile, “I might ask the same of you. No matter how many times I take you, I do not have you. I do not have enough.”

  He pulled off his shirt and draped it over her shoulders. “I must find you some proper clothing.” He turned and retrieved her plate. “You should eat.”

  “You too.” She regretted the words the instant they came out of her mouth. They made it sound like she cared about him. Which she didn’t.

  The corners of his mouth quirked up into an amused smile. “I have been hungry before, it will hardly kill me.”

  She took her plate to the table before she looked at it. It contained an irregularly shaped piece of meat, a small mound of jumbled yellow matter and a pile of browned, burnt organic material.

  “What’s this food?”

  “Steak, eggs and hash browns—it was considered hearty breakfast fare the last time I was in the United States. You are American, are you not?”

  “Who knows?” Darkriver picked operatives who would blend into the populations of their assigned locales. Darkriver had taught her to speak English like an American and Shanghainese like a native, but she had no memory of her life before Darkriver. She could have been from anywhere.

  She poked the steak with her fork and encountered something hard. “What’s this?”

  “The bone,” he answered, cutting into his own meat with one of the steak knives she had used as weapons the morning before.

  “You mean this steak came from an animal?”

  “A cow, to be precise.”

  She pushed her plate away. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Then I shall keep quiet about where the eggs came from.”

  “But you can buy perfectly decent vat-grown meat. Eating the flesh of animals is barbaric.”

  “And what is killing people for money?”

  She stretched her lips into a copy of his closemouthed smile, but didn’t say a word to answer him.

  He laughed, a quick, unwilling bark that made her want to grin with pride for having drawn it from him. He composed himself almost immediately. “You are already a barbarian, Arden. Stop
complaining and eat.”

  Her stomach growled. She cut a piece of the steak and shoved it into her mouth before she could hesitate. It tasted good, like vat-grown meat but denser, less bland. Before she knew it, her plate was clean.

  She looked up and saw that Aniketos was still eating. She could not help but watch him. He was a mystery.

  He cut his steak one-handed, with deft precision, and used the end of his knife to bring each piece to his mouth. She knew from experience how agile his big, long-fingered hands could be. But beyond his manual dexterity, there was something economical about his movements. He seemed to complete every action with the least amount of movement and with absolute surety of its result.

  She had seen the same sort of grace in professional athletes who practiced the same set of moves over and over, day after day, over the course of years. Aniketos was like that, but to a much greater degree. Every movement he made had the same grace, as though he had a hundred years of practice for even the most mundane of tasks.

  “How old are you?”

  He stretched his firm lips into the closemouthed smile that told her more clearly than words that he did not intend to answer her question. “You would not believe me if I told you. You would accuse me of telling you tales.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The truth is, I do not know. Counting the years of my life would be like counting the days in a decade—an exercise in minutiae.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

  “If you do not like my answers, do not ask me questions. I have questions of my own for you. Tell me about the Hatcheries.”

  She rolled her eyes. “We’re back to this again. Did you really think a hot fuck or six would make me spill my secrets?”

  “I may have entertained the thought. Would a seventh convince you?”

  “Nothing will convince me. If you plan to torture me or to drug me, then take me back to that room you set up to look like a basement and get it over with. You still won’t get what you want.”

  “I have no need to torture you to get what I want.”

  “Oh?” She smirked at his conceit.

  “Darkriver will do it for me. You have been gone for three days, and I am still alive. They will assume you have failed the mission or betrayed them. Either way, they will not treat you kindly.”

  Arden felt the blood drain from her face. Darkriver had taught her to escape and to survive. They had taught her to kill and like it, and to withstand almost any torture. But above all, Darkriver’s most potent lesson had been this: do not fail or betray the Darkriver Corporation. The consequences were enough to make even the most callous of Darkriver’s killers tremble.

  She jumped to her feet and hurled her plate at him.

  The plate broke against his forehead, dragging a jagged cut into the skin above his brow. The cut had closed by the time he raised his hand to wipe the blood away.

  “You have been Darkriver’s loyal creature for almost two decades, yet they will repay your one and only failure with pain and death. Give me your loyalty instead. Tell me you are mine, and I will protect you from Darkriver’s reprisals forever.”

  “No.” Arden gathered the edges of his shirt around her and swept out of the room with as much dignity as a person could have when she wasn’t wearing any pants.

  She couldn’t escape, and she couldn’t kill her captor, but by God and the Devil and everything else she didn’t believe in, she could get herself some clothes. As resolutions went, it wasn’t earth-shaking, but it was a start. Once she was dressed, she’d figure out what to do about Aniketos’ offer. Arden knew it was in her best interests to give Aniketos the information he wanted. Too bad her best interests weren’t her only responsibility.

  She wasn’t a hero. She wasn’t even a good person. She was a killer, and she always would be. But she had saved a life once—she had saved a life by keeping a secret. If she left Darkriver, the company would investigate all the things she’d left behind. And in a place so full of danger and distrust, secrets didn’t keep themselves.

  London

  Three years earlier

  Arden waited in the dark for the sound of gunshots. How strange it was to find herself on the other side of this door, playing the role that Eden had played for her. She would save the boy from the policemen he believed were chasing him. She would tell him that she understood why he had killed the man with the pliers. She would offer understanding and safe haven at a place called Darkriver. And, after he took her hand, she would teach him to kill.

  A shot sounded in the hall beyond the door. She waited for the second shot, for the hurried thud of the child’s footsteps.

  There was no second shot, no footsteps. After silent minutes, Arden slid the hidden door open. The hall beyond was pitch black and cold as a Norwegian winter. She clicked on her flashlight. Her breath wound through the beam of light like steam.

  She heard a sound. A child crying. She followed it, playing her flashlight along the hall in front of her. Her beam passed across the boy. He was filthy—as she had been—bleeding and frightened. His black hair was a mess, his dark, almond-shaped eyes were wet with tears.

  “Ssssh,” she whispered. “Are you all right?”

  “I think I killed them,” the boy sobbed. The kid had a crisp British accent, like something out of a BBC miniseries. Little fucking Lord Fauntleroy. Too distinctive. She’d have to fix it.

  Arden reached him, put an arm around his shoulders, trying to feign sympathy and interest. “Killed who?”

  “The man with the pliers and the policemen who wanted to put me in jail.”

  Arden played her flashlight further along the hall. It found the first body, slumped and cold, without a mark on it. A few meters on, a second blue-uniformed body was crumpled against the wall. She shone the light on the floor beneath them, but there was no sign of injury or blood.

  Further down the hall, she spied a figure that appeared to be leaning against the wall. She played her light over it and saw that the body was held up by a jagged metal pole driven through the skull and into the wall behind it.

  Saints and sinners! The kid was a killer—natural-born and brutal. Maybe having a protégé wouldn’t be such a drag, after all.

  “How did you do this?”

  The boy offered her his closed left hand. The red birthmark wound outward from his palm like a bloodstain. She opened her hand beneath his and he dropped the contents of his fist into her palm. A bullet.

  Now she really was interested. “How?”

  “I think about it, and things move. Only, it takes energy. I used the energy from the lights to get away from the man with the pliers. I tried to use the heat from the air to stop the policeman’s bullet, but the air was too cold. I didn’t mean to take the heat from their bodies.” The boy hugged her and she awkwardly patted at his back.

  “You’re some kind of psychic?”

  “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” the boy muttered.

  Arden didn’t believe in psychic phenomena, but she didn’t have any better explanation for the two unmarked bodies on the floor.

  She patted the kid’s back again. She was no good at comforting people, but he didn’t seem to notice. The kid hung onto her like she was the last lifejacket on the Titanic. She almost felt a little bad for him. “You’re psychic, kid. It’s not your fault.”

  She pried him loose and approached the first uniformed body. She took the head between her hands and twisted until she felt the bone break. She did the same to the second body.

  “What are you doing?” the boy asked.

  “If I burn the place down, no one will ever know these two didn’t die of broken necks—well, they won’t be able to prove it.” She rolled her eyes at the confusion written across his face. “I’m helping you, kid,” Arden explained. “You’ve killed three people. That makes you a dangerous person. But I know a place where they won’t mind that you’re a killer. Would you like to go there?”

  The boy nodded.

&n
bsp; “The only thing is, you can’t tell them about the psychic stuff. If you do, they’ll want to study you, lock you up in a lab and poke at your brain all day. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded again. His tears had stopped, but his face was still wet and his eyes were frightened.

  “Don’t cry, kid. Everything is going to be okay. I promise.”

  She offered her hand. He took it.

  She pushed open the door to the antiquities room and headed straight for the drawer that held the Japanese robe. The gold embroidered fabric was heavy and stiff, but it didn’t smell like Aniketos. She couldn’t think with the smell of him still clinging to the shirt he’d given her.

  She pulled off the shirt and flung it toward the corner before shrugging into the kimono. She was taller than the garment’s original owner, the hem just reached her ankles and the sleeves ended well above her wrists. There was a wrap of some sort in the drawer beneath the kimono. She pulled it out—meters and meters of light silk.

  Arden looked into the drawer to see if there was a shorter piece of cloth she could use to tie the robe, and laughed aloud. Hah! She couldn’t believe she had missed this. Beneath the Japanese robe, a slim antique katana and a shorter wakizashi rested on black velvet beside corresponding wooden saya. She picked up the swords. Her hands fit the cord-wrapped grips quite nicely. She held them out, tested their balance. Perfect.

  She remembered the technique for fighting with two swords. Niten’ichi: two heavens as one.

  She tossed the silk sash into the air and chased it with the long and short swords. They cut through the silk without a whisper. Once, twice, a third time—four pieces of silk floated to the floor. What lovely weapons. She found a length of silk about a meter long and used it to tie her kimono closed. Then, she sheathed the katana and wakizashi in their saya and slid each into her belt beneath the opposite arm.

  She heard the faceted glass doorknob turn and quickly sat at the writing desk.